Project Scroll Research Note 2026-11: Older than "about 1839": the Treats, Henry Dewey and the red-chalk warning on the road to Dewey's Lake, Silver Creek Township, Michigan

The 1882 History of Cass County, Michigan tells how Timothy Treat's family, coming up an old track from Indian Lake into Silver Creek Township, found at the fork at the south-east corner of Section 16, "one branch leading to Dewey's Lake, the other to their future home," a peeled tree on which an earlier traveler had written in red chalk: "Turn to the left and go to the Devil." The same page has the family leave Aurora, New York, "In September, 1837," and reach Silver Creek only "After a residence of two years in the town of Ontwa": about 1839. The book's own township records put them there earlier. Timothy Treat was elected the township's first supervisor at its first town meeting, in April 1837. He, his son Sullivan and Henry Dewey are on the township's roll of resident taxpayers for 1838, and Timothy Treat and Henry Dewey on the poll list of its first election after that meeting, in 1838. The family genealogy of 1893 has Timothy in Michigan from the fall of 1834 and Sullivan settling in Silver Creek "at the age of twenty-one," about 1832; its rule for the children ("the first nine born in Aurora, the last three in Silver Creek") puts Timothy's tenth child, born in March 1835, in Silver Creek; and it records his daughter Fidelia's marriage to Philander Dunning, a Silver Creek taxpayer of 1838, in July 1835. A neighbor in Keeler Township, Van Buren County, who began his cabin on 7 April 1837, named "Samuel Treat, at Silver Creek" as his neighbor to the south. The warning was therefore very probably standing at the fork before April 1837. And Henry Dewey, whose settlement by the lake an old resident put "not until 1841," was voting and taxed in Silver Creek in 1838.

Project Scroll Research Note 2026-11, version 2. The note sets out the record quoted, where it is held, what it changes, its limits, and what was searched before calling it new. Web version: projectscroll.com/discoveries/notes/2026-11/.